If I seem a bit... distracted, possibly a bit disjointed in my thoughts this morning, it's because of the vomitous black bile fountaining from every orifice on my body. I've already filled two wading pools since I woke up this morning, and I'm arranging for a tanker truck to be backed up to my window so I can make it through the workday.
It will take me a long time to comprehensively cover the extensive list of people I hate anew as of this morning. But I can't get to that quite yet, because there are a bunch of people out there who I don't hate. Because there are people out there who feel worse than I do this morning, and these are the people that, despite all evidence to the contrary, gave a fuck. They went out there and they volunteered and they tried their damndest and they gave, and these people, whose only crime was setting aside their cynicism, were betrayed.
They were betrayed by the system, they were betrayed by the candidates, they were betrayed by the media, they were betrayed by the very electorate they set aside their cynicism to attempt to serve. They tried to make a difference, and NOTHING CHANGED.
Spare me your "two states not yet counted", electoral-college, keep hope alive bullshit, please. Even if, by some quirk of fate, John Kerry wrests some kind of provisinal ballot Ohio "miracle", we lost. We lost small, but we lost HARD. Mongiardo lost. Wetterling lost. Daschle lost. Eleven states passed gay-hating, homophobic constitutional amendments by HUGE MARGINS. If our hopes are pinned on a couple hundred thousand provisional ballots in Ohio, we are well and truly fucked.You know what you won't hear a lot of this year? Democrats calling for the reform of the Electoral College system. You know why? Because FOUR MILLION MORE PEOPLE voted for Bush than Kerry. And you can believe whatever you want in your little lefty heart of hearts, but if you think the right was able to suppress four million votes this year, then I've got a war in Iraq to sell you. Cheap.
What I hate most is that over the past couple of days, even I had started to take leave of my fucking senses. I was saying things like "cell-phone" and "youth vote" and "break for the challenger". I knew I was doing it, but I couldn't stop myself. I wanted, desperately, to believe that even the inept, clueless, big-haired New Democrats on the DNC could not manage to fuck up an election that basically boiled down to pointing at the guy running things and shouting "JUST LOOK AT THAT! LOOK! JESUS FUCK LOOK! I MEAN, COME ON!". I wanted to believe, like a good lefty, that the country is basically on our side, they just never step up and show their true numbers. Even though every single second of my experience and knowledge to date has told me otherwise.
This is where we live. This is who we are. The revolution will not be televised, because there is no revolution. And there never will be. We can barely manage to trot fifty feet to deface our neighbor's campaign sign. We can give a senile old baseball players six more years to make the laws we all live under because his opponent might be gay. We turn 10% of the population into second-class citizens because we think they're icky and we think the invisible man in the sky told us to hate them. We fuck over our fellow man because a bald, cranky man told us that dark-skinned dudes in turbans will blow us up.
There's plenty of blame to go around for this debacle, to be sure. But it starts with each voter. It starts with every single one of the 58.2 million people who could not look at the events of the past four years and realize, regardless of their individual political philosophy, that the guy at the top was a corrupt fuckup. Fifty eight million people went out and said YES to corrupt fuckuppery, and even assuming 65% national turnout, that's another sixty five million people who didn't feel strongly enough about corrupt fuckuppery to do something about it. That's one hundred and twenty three million people. That's America.
In fact, on behalf of those one hundred and twenty three million people, I hereby apologize. I apologize to the people who spent all day trying to help folks vote. The election judges, those who challenged the challengers, the people who drove voters around, the people who fed and helped and kept people sane in the long lines, the people who made sure voters knew their rights. I even apologize to the FUCKING IDIOTS who spent the past week standing around on street corners waving signs and getting cars to honk at them instead of doing something useful. I have to apologize to them on behalf o fthe hundred and twenty three million fucktards that make up the majority of this great nation, because not a single one of the fucktards will step up and do so.
And we all know why, don't we.